SEO Basics

Screaming your mom and dad are going to be so mad at me will not help you rank higher in the search engines. In fact, it will likely hurt your ranking because it looks like spam.

Set up GSC and Bing Webmaster tools

SEO basics are important for any website owner or manager to understand. Setting up Google Search Console (GSC) and Bing Webmaster Tools (BingWT) should be the first step in any SEO campaign. These tools can help you track your website’s progress and identify areas that need improvement. Additionally, both GSC and BingWT offer valuable insights that can help you optimize your site for better search engine visibility.

Set up Google Analytics

The first step to improving your website’s SEO is to set up Google Analytics. This will allow you to track your website’s traffic and performance, which will give you valuable insights into where your visitors are coming from and what they’re doing on your site.

To set up Google Analytics, you’ll need to create a Google account and then sign up for a free Analytics account. Once you’ve done this, you can add the Analytics tracking code to your website. If you’re using a content management system like WordPress, there are plugins that can do this for you automatically.

Once you’ve added the tracking code to your site, it can take up to 24 hours for data to appear in your Analytics account. However, it’s best to wait at least a week before making any decisions based on the data. This will give you a more accurate picture of your website’s traffic.

Install and configure an SEO plugin (wordpress)

If you’re using WordPress, there are a number of plugins you can use to help with your SEO. One of the most popular is Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is a plugin that allows you to configure a number of settings to help improve your SEO. Some of the things you can do with Yoast SEO include:

-configuring your title and meta data
-analyzing your content for keyword density and readability
-generating an XML sitemap
-setting up breadcrumbs
-and more!

Installing Yoast SEO is easy. Just head to the plugin page on your WordPress site and click “Install Now.” Once it’s installed, you’ll need to configure some settings. The Yoast SEO plugin will walk you through this process.

Keyword Research

Identify your competitors

In order to identify your competitors, start by brainstorming a list of potential companies that offer similar products or services. If you’re not sure where to begin, try using a competitor research tool like Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner or SpyFu to get started.

Once you have a list of potential competitors, visit their websites and take note of their key marketing strategies. Some things you may want to look for include:

• The kinds of products or services they offer
• Their target market
• Their pricing strategy
• Their promotional strategies (e.g., advertising, public relations, etc.)

By familiarizing yourself with your competitors, you’ll be better equipped to develop a marketing strategy that will allow you to differentiate your company in the marketplace.

Conduct a keyword gap analysis

Conducting a keyword gap analysis is an important step in any SEO or PPC campaign. By comparing the keywords that you are targeting to those that your competitors are targeting, you can get a better sense of where you need to focus your efforts. For example, if all of your competitors are targeting the same keywords as you, then you may need to find some new keywords to target. On the other hand, if your competitors are targeting keywords that you are not, then you may want to consider adding those keywords to your campaign.

Find your main ‘money’ keywords

The first step to any good keyword research is to identify your main ‘money’ keywords – these are the terms that you really want to rank for in search engines, as they are most likely to result in targeted traffic (and, ultimately, conversions).

To do this, you need to understand what your target audience is looking for – what needs and wants do they have that your product or service can address? Once you have a good understanding of this, you can start brainstorming potential keywords.

To help you get started, here are some questions to ask yourself when brainstorming keywords:

• What are the most common search terms related to my product or service?
• What are the most specific search terms related to my product or service?
• What are some alternative search terms that my target audience might use?
• What are some long-tail keywords that I could target?

Once you have a list of potential keywords, it’s time to start doing some research. There are a number of different tools and techniques that you can use to find out how popular a particular keyword is, and how much competition there is for it.

Some popular keyword research tools include: Google AdWords Keyword Planner, WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool, KWFinder, and UbberSuggest.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website for the search engines. It is a subset of SEO that focuses on the technical aspects of a website. Technical SEO includes optimizing the website structure, the code, the sitemap, the robots.txt file, and the 301 redirects.

Leverage “Inspect URL” feature in GSC

The Inspect URL feature in Google Search Console allows you to check if your website is properly indexed by Google, and whether there are any issues with your site that might be preventing it from appearing in search results. To use this feature, simply enter the URL of your website into the search bar and click “inspect.”

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

Making sure your website is mobile-friendly is essential in today’s business world. With over half of all web traffic now coming from mobile devices, it’s more important than ever to make sure your site can be easily viewed and interacted with on a phone or tablet.

There are a few different ways to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. The most common and effective method is to use responsive design, which means that your website will automatically adjust to fit the screen size of the device it’s being viewed on. Another option is to create a separate mobile version of your website that can be accessed from a phone or tablet.

Whichever method you choose, it’s important to test your website on multiple devices to make sure it looks and works the way you want it to. Mobile-friendliness is an important ranking factor for search engines, so it’s also worth making sure your site is as search engine friendly as possible.

Check your site’s loading speed

Your site’s loading speed is important for a few reasons. First, faster loading pages improve the user experience. No one likes to wait around for a page to load, so if your site is slow, people are likely to leave before they even see what you have to offer. Second, Google takes page loading speed into account when ranking sites in its search results. So if you want your site to rank well, you need to make sure it loads quickly.

There are a few different ways to check your site’s loading speed. One option is to use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. This tool will give you a report on your page’s loading speed and provide some recommendations for improvements. Another option is to use Pingdom’s Website Speed Test tool. This tool will also give you a report on your page’s loading speed and provide recommendations for improvements.

Once you know how fast (or slow) your site is currently loading, you can work on making some improvements. Some common ways to improve your site’s loading speed include optimizing your images, minifying your CSS and JavaScript files, and using a content delivery network (CDN).

On-page and Content

Fix duplicate, missing, and truncated title tags

Duplicate title tags are a major issue for websites – especially e-commerce websites. If you have duplicate title tags, it means that you have multiple pages on your website with the exact same or very similar title tag. Not only is this confusing for users and search engines, but it can also result in major search engine penalties for your website.

To fix this issue, you need to find all of the pages on your website with duplicate title tags and then modify the title tags so that they are unique. You can do this by adding extra information to the title tag, such as the product name or category, or by changing the way that the titles are formatted.

In addition to duplicate title tags, another common issue is missing or truncated title tags. A missing title tag means that there is no title tag on a particular page of your website. This is problematic because it means that search engines will not be able to properly index and rank that page. A truncated title tag means that the text in the title tag has been Cut off by Google because it was too long. This can also lead to problems with indexing and ranking and should be fixed as soon as possible.

Finally, another common on-page SEO issue is thin content. Thin content is defined as content that adds little value to users or doesn’t meet their needs. This type of content is often short (less than 300 words), lacks visuals, and provides minimal information. Not only does this type of content not help users, but it can also lead to search engine penalties from Google.

If you have any of these issues on your website, it’s important to fix them as soon as possible. Luckily, most of these issues are relatively easy to fix if you have a basic understanding of on-page SEO.

Find and fix duplicate or missing meta descriptions

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines.

Content is what makes your site worthy of a search result. It’s the substance of your site, the articles, blog posts, product descriptions, photos, and videos that help people understand what you do and why they should care.

Find and fix multiple H1 tags

Your page should have one, and only one, H1 tag. This is not just a best practice, but it’s also a requirement of the Google guidelines.

If you have more than one H1 tag on your page, you need to fix that as soon as possible. Multiple H1 tags will confuse both your readers and Google, and it will hurt your SEO.

To find and fix multiple H1 tags, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog. Just crawl your site and look for pages with more than one H1 tag. Then, simply edit the code and remove all but one H1 tag from each page.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the process of optimizing a website for better search engine rankings. It is the opposite of on-page SEO, which refers to optimizing a website for higher search engine rankings.Off-page SEO is a major part of any successful SEO campaign.There are many factors that contribute to off-page SEO, including social media, link building, and local listings.

Analyze your competitor’s link profile

Off-page SEO (also called “off-site SEO”) refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs).

A solid off-page SEO strategy can do wonders for your website’s visibility and organic reach.

To get started with your own off-page SEO efforts, begin by taking a look at your competitors’ link profiles. This will give you a good idea of the types of links that are helping them rank. Once you have a good understanding of what kinds of links they have, you can start working on building similar links for your own website.

Conduct a link intersect analysis

A link intersect is an analysis that looks at the intersections between sets of links. In other words, it lets you know if you have links in common with other websites. This can be a helpful way to find new linking opportunities.

Here’s how to conduct a link intersect analysis:

1. Make a list of your top competitors.
2. Use a tool like Majestic or ahrefs to export the links of each competitor website.
3. Import the lists of competitor links into a spreadsheet and remove duplicates.
4. Use the “vlookup” function to find the intersection between your website and each competitor’s link list. This will give you a list of websites that link to both you and your competitor.
5. Reach out to these websites and ask them to consider linking to your website as well.
   Target your competitors’ broken backlinks
   
   Your competitors’ backlinks are a great source of link building opportunities for your website. By targeting the broken backlinks of your competitors, you can easily find high-quality link building prospects that will help improve your SEO.

First, you need to find the backlinks of your competitors. You can use a tool like Majestic or Moz to find the backlinks of any website. Once you have a list of your competitor’s backlinks, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog to determine which of those links are broken.

The next step is to reach out to the website owners who are linking to your competitor’s broken links and ask them to link to your website instead. This is a great way to build high-quality backlinks that will help improve your SEO.